The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [171]
Then the world went to war again. This time, the Stay More town meeting lasted for a little longer than the three-and-a-half-minute discussion of the previous war, but not much: the general consensus was that if this feller Hitler wanted Europe, why shouldn’t he have it? But he was also trying to get England, and that was where our foreparents came from, and we oughtn’t to let him have that, so we ought to at least help the British hang on to their lands. Several Stay More boys went off and joined the service. Sonora hoped that maybe the war would rouse Hank from his lethargy and despondency. It did not.
But then some yellow people who lived halfway around the world sent their ships and planes to a place called Pearl that was part of America even though it was out in the middle of the ocean, and bombed hell out of it. That was going too far. Hank got out of bed, dressed, kissed his wife and babies goodbye, and said so long to his parents and brothers and uncles, and went off to join the service. He didn’t know which branch of the service to join. The Army offered to teach him a trade, and the Marines offered to make a real man out of him, but he kept thinking of Pearl, which was way out in the ocean, and he decided the best way to get to it would be the Navy. So he joined it, and after basic training they let him come home for a little while to show off his uniform and get his picture in the Disaster and impregnate Sonora again. Then they sent him to a school where they taught him how to take apart and repair and put together radio equipment. There was hardly any trace of his frakes remaining, so he studied hard, and by the time he was shipped to sea he could write to Sonora and tell her that he was “Semen First Class,” to which she replied, “You sure are, honey.”
He was the first Stay Moron ever to see the sea. His ship went all over the ocean, but it didn’t go to Pearl. Because the enemy commenced shooting at and trying to bomb his ship, they raised his pay, and he didn’t have anything to spend it on, so he sent most all of it home, and Sonora and her babies were able to live a good life. Hank was so good at patching up and operating radios that he was transferred to a bigger ship, and promoted to petty officer. He survived the sinkings of two destroyers, a battleship, and an aircraft carrier, and by then he was a master chief petty officer (and also the father of a third daughter, Janice). Eventually they shipped him back stateside for shore leave, and once again he came home to show off his uniform and to attempt once again to create Eli Willard Ingledew.
The Jasper Disaster took his portrait and printed it on their front page, and noted that he was eligible for commission as ensign. Hank was saddened to learn that some of his childhood friends had been killed in France and on the beaches of the Pacific. His brothers Jackson and Tracy had been drafted and were fighting in Europe, and his youngest brother William Robert (“Billy Bob”) would have been drafted, except that he was the last son in the family, and there was a law against it.
There were very few young men in Stay More; in the previous war there had been very few young men out of Stay More. The canning factory was no longer operating, on account of a shortage of tin, but the women and boys and old men went on harvesting the snap crop and ’mater crop and canning it in re-used Mason jars. The war was good for Stay More in the sense that all its young men fighting overseas sent most of their paychecks home, and there was so much mail from them and to them that the post office was permitted to reopen for the duration of the war, and